Notes from the Product Manager for January, 2014

By James Koole

We’re back with another monthly update for you. January started out very busy here at Hover and stayed that way.

ICANN verification

We rolled out some features to help customers with the new ICANN verification requirements that I talked about in a couple of blog posts last month. Specifically, we’re using the notification bar and the icons in the domain manager to alert you when verification is required for any domains in your account.

On the subject of ICANN verification, you’ve been adapting well! We were a bit apprehensive when we turned this stuff on as required by ICANN, but it seems that Hover customers were already doing a great job keeping their WHOIS information up-to-date.

We’re continuing to work on how we communicate the verification status as we go along.

The little things

Other than that, we tackled a whole bunch of little things in the last few weeks:

Made it more clear that Hover bills in USD on our invoices.

Cleaned up and standardized email templates.

Lowered the price for Google Apps when you choose to pay annually.

Fixed a bug that prevented some customers from using certain characters in passwords on account creation. (Thanks to Hover customer Ben for helping us track this one down)

Prepared for the release of a whole bunch of new domain extensions in February.

New country-code domains

We’ve enabled a pair of new country-code domains for registration: .ch (Switzerland) and .li (Liechtenstein). These are both open to anyone to register and both are priced at $15 for new registrations. If you have existing .ch or .li domains elsewhere, you can transfer them in for just $10! You keep the time you had, plus another year is added to the registration term.

So responsive! Such navigation menu!

Oh, and if you visit Hover on your mobile phone, you’ll see that we made the site mobile responsive. We haven’t done the logged-in area yet, but you can now search for and buy a domain, transfer a domain, or renew your domain on your phone without having to pinch and zoom around a tiny version of the desktop site. And we added a sweet new navigation menu for small screens.

More to come!

February is already shaping up to be a busy month with a few exciting new features being worked on right now including two-step login (and some additional security features), new generic domain extensions like .bike, .photography and more. And we should have support for a couple new country-code domains to tell you about.